Why? To better incentivize people to make music in the 1940s and 50s?
If I recorded a song in 1961, that recording would go out of copyright this year under the previous regime.
The rights and wrongs of lengthy copyright protection are a separate issue, but the differential treatment of different artistic forms is something I feel should be addressed. This is a step towards equalisation (not full equalisation but a lot less controversial and so easier to enact), and for that I'm thankful.
Nor is it clear that different countries and different media should have the same rules in the first place.
The problem is it would be like any one of the entrepreneurs on HN being told in X-many years that "Sorry, you lived too long so your company is being taken from you, you'll no longer receive any profit from it and it IS NOT being purchased from you at a fair market value. Sucks to be you.
Copyright is one of the most difficult issues we have, because almost anyone who has worked to make their own money be it entrepreneur, writer, musician, etc. would think it abhorrent that they could eventually be forced to give up their work that may still hold a reputable value on the market be forcibly given up for economic loss. It's quite frankly absurd.
Then you have organizations like the RIAA and MPAA who act on behalf of mega-corps that have conglomerated thousands of peoples work under themselves and keeps those artists trapped with huge debts, lengthy record contracts, etc. The RIAA does to musicians what Monsanto does to farmers. They're elephants throwing their weight around in a pen full of guinea pigs, and its hard to see these corporations as anything but evil and greedy. Basically because all they are are evil and greedy.
Then you have the legislators who all have a lot of green mysteriously slipped into their pockets, and they claim to be pro-business and support copyright because it helps the little guy. Whilst the little guy is generally unable to be helped because they're firmly squashed beneath an elephants feet.
The problem gets really complex when an authors children starts making legitimate derivative works, because then the series as a whole needs to be kept in copyright to enforce the derivative works clause. So who decides what would be a legitimate derivative work to extend copyright to the end of the child's life, and what isn't so the material has a chance to re-enter the market and not be killed off by the Estates greed.
Personally I believe copyright should be 20 years on a work and in case of a series it should be 20 years for the whole from the date of the latest derivative work. Basically, if an author or their estate haven't produced a derivative in 20 years, then it's time to shit or get off the pot. As a writer I don't think this would be harsh, it might encourage creativity and discourage people trying to make Hollywood sales on everything they make.
Why would it be? Copyright was initially supposed to bring betterment to society, not even more wealth to successful artists. How does extending performer rights by 20 years improve society as a whole?
> Authors get to, musicians don't
Compositors already did. They're musicians. Performers did not.
> The problem is it would be like any one of the entrepreneurs on HN being told in X-many years that "Sorry, you lived too long so your company is being taken from you, you'll no longer receive any profit from it and it IS NOT being purchased from you at a fair market value.
No, no it would not.
> Personally I believe copyright should be 20 years on a work and in case of a series it should be 20 years for the whole from the date of the latest derivative work. Basically, if an author or their estate haven't produced a derivative in 20 years, then it's time to shit or get off the pot.
That's a highway to even worse abuse than the current system (which in the fullness of time will already reach infinite copyright duration).
> As a writer I don't think this would be harsh, it might encourage creativity.
How? A new release with half a paragraph changed would already be a derivative. Have you even seen how many times Lucas has "remastered" star wars?
That isn't at all what copyright is like. You don't own the song; you own the copyright on it, meaning that the government agrees to stop people from producing their own copies of the song without your permission. And when copyright expires, you aren't forced to give up your song — you can still have it to enjoy for as long as you like, but you aren't allowed to stop other people from making others like it anymore.
Copyright is protection from competition. If copyright on companies existed, there would only be one bakery in the world because whoever first made a bakery would own the copyright on bakery companies. This is obviously absurd when applied to companies, which is why it isn't. At a certain point, though, it also becomes absurd when applied to artistic works, because the whole point of giving this protection to artistic works is to enrich our culture, not shove our culture into IP silos in perpetuity.
This is a false analogy. It is not the company that would be taken but the right to copy it's products that were produced, and sold X years ago. Put another way, we don't allow artists only X years to produce work and then acquire them as vassals of the state. Moreover the value of works for an artist when that work falls out of copyright is not normally zero unless it was approximately zero at the start; an artist can still perform the work and get paid particularly if that work was deemed by society to be of cultural value.
Why is this fair? Why would a copyright term of 20 years max be fair? Because it's a deal. The state provides monopoly protection in exchange for release into the public domain after the stated period. If you don't want to take the deal then you can keep your works private.
No, it would be the products sold today. Copyright doesn't expire once a work stops being sold. The reason a change has been made is because the works are still being sold in a large enough volume that people stand to loose enough money to lobby government to protect.
Perhaps not taking your company, but when they're taking your product and profitability, they're certainly taking away your production lines. Who isn't going to buy the entire discography of the Rolling Stones for $10 when the band is still charging a fortune per album.
Part of the copyright deal is that we, the people, provide a framework of legal protections on the understanding that works are released in to the public domain. As with patents, copyright from the public perspective is about encouraging innovation and creation but also about ultimately freeing ideas and creations for the public use.
It is a vast shame that US corporate profit is now apparently dictating statute in Europe to the detriment of the ordinary people of Europe.
Sorry, but no, it isn't. You might think that it should be their right, but nowhere is this spelled out as a fundamental human right and there are plenty of people who think otherwise.
Also, your proposed 20 years copyright + 20 years extensions for derivatives would make it trivial to extend copyright indefinitely by producing a trivial derivative at 19 years. It could even be automated. I think it would be better to fix the derivative works clause so such a work is copyrighted on its own.
Also, you don't seem to have a clue what a derivative is. A derivative work is a whole new work based on the original copyright and that original material being necessary for the derivative work. Sequels/prequels/whatever are derivatives, an edited edition is not. I don't get what's so hard for people to grasp about that.
The copyright could be structured so that the copyright does lapse, but in the existence of derivative works the derivative copyright is extended, giving protection from someone writing an unauthorized sequel as long as the new material is in copyright.
First, according to the Wikipedia entry on derivative work, "[...]The Mona Lisa With a Moustache. Often used by law professors to illustrate legal concept of derivative work." seems to suggest that producing a derivative work is indeed trivial. Copyright doesn't care if anyone would actually want to consume the work.
Also, why is it that protecting derivative works would automatically mean that the original needs protection as well? While you're preparing the 21st edition of your annual comic series, I make one that is a derivative of your first edition (now out of copyright). Sure, it's inconvenient for you, but I can't pretend to be "the real thing" as your trademark is certainly still covered. The fan-fiction universe seems to suggest such a "parallel" universe can exist without anyone mistaking one for the other.
> Sure, it's inconvenient for you, but I can't pretend to be "the real thing" as your trademark is certainly still covered.Sure, it's inconvenient for you, but I can't pretend to be "the real thing" as your trademark is certainly still covered.
Actually yes you can, it's virtually impossible to trademark a name and it would be easy to fool untold thousands by publishing an eighth Harry Potter and simply leave out the authors name. This then lands the pressure on book sellers to vet the works they sell to ensure a work is a legitimate sequel so as not to damage their own profits by selling inferior knockoffs.
> The fan-fiction universe seems to suggest such a "parallel" universe can exist without anyone mistaking one for the other.
Because a crudely written story on some fanfic board is really going to confuse consumers in a bookstore or on Amazon. Seriously, it's absurd claiming people don't mistake the two when you'll never see the two together in the first place. You'll never see fanfic anywhere but backwater sites because when people start making money off of it, the person will be screwed beyond belief. People get raped by the RIAA for allegedly costing them money; imagine what lawyers can do when they can prove you cost them money by having a record of your sales.
Personally, I'd give software the shortest copyright terms, music slightly longer, and literary works slightly longer than that, with no copyright term ever longer than 28 years.
As an aside, increasing lifespans should give us more time to enjoy the world and push it forward. Instead, they're used as a justification to slow the world down with things like longer copyright terms for long-lived authors.
What good does it do a song you wrote in 1960 to be copyrighted in 2060?
Look at Disney and don't tell me that a lack of copyright makes creativity. A lack of copyright just enables corporations to mass produce drivel from non-copyrighted works and cut out the talented people. Disney is barely a step away from just an algorithm that creates film scripts from Brothers Grimm stories.
Copyright is about the government stopping other people from using a work without permission of the copyright holder, not about identifying whose work something is.
There's other ways to handle the music labels than abolish copyright.